That is the latest word from Egypt.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony were immortalised as two of historyÂ’s greatest lovers, but their final resting place has always been a mystery. Now archaeologists in Egypt are about to start excavating a site that they believe could conceal their tombs.
Zahi Hawass, director of EgyptÂ’s Superior Council for Antiquities, said yesterday that there was evidence to suggest that Cleopatra and Mark Antony were buried together in the complex tunnel system underlying the Tabusiris Magna temple, 17 miles from the city of Alexandria.
The dig, which begins next week, could reveal answers to the many myths surrounding the pair — including speculation about the Queen’s reputed beauty and the couple’s suicide. Teams from Egypt and the Dominican Republic will begin excavating three sites along the tunnels in the hope that one of the deep shafts will lead to a burial chamber. The sites were identified by a radar scan.

Now let’s acknowledge something here – Hawass is certainly a sensationalist who is great at promoting wild flights of fancy along with legitimate Egyptology. But the reality is that such announcements have accompanied many significant discoveries. Let’s wait and see if the coming weeks and months bring another announcement – this one telling us that the tomb of two of the world’s most famous lovers has been found.

Posted by: Greg at 10:09 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The Knights Templar have always been a fascinating subject for me. Among the reasons for that fascination has been the speculation that the Shroud of Turin – believed by many to be the burial shroud of Christ – was once in their possession, and may even have been the idol that the Knights were accused of venerating when the order was suppressed. I don’t know whether or not that story is true, but we now know that the Shroud was once in the possession of the Templars.

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relicÂ’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.
Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.
However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.

We now can date the Shroud back to the 1200s, significantly before the date that radiocarbon testing had placed it. And we now know that some of what the Templars were accused of was clearly unjust. So what we have here is a mystery and a history that trumps any novel – take that, Dan Brown!

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